Editing large PDF document in indesign

Hello there! Hope my question fits in this section! :grimacing:

So I have received a pdf document (a planner) with 156 pages of which 18 needs to be completely changed.

I have no indesign file for this specific file, although some of those 18 pages could be transferred form another planner that I have the indesign file.

My question is - what would you do in this situation? Should I make an indesign document with 156 pages and place each page of the pdf inside the document? Or maybe I could make those 18 pages and somehow put in the pdf??

Asking for indesign or any other type of document for this project isnā€™t an option since those project files doesnā€™t exist anymore.

Thank you in advance! :slight_smile:

This is the approach Iā€™d take. Create the new pages in ID, export them as a PDF, open up the original PDF in Acrobat, replace the pages with the new pages.

This is a decision for the client to make. Explain that, without the native file, you have to recreate from scratch, which is going to cost him X dollars. If he agrees to that, well, great. Itā€™s also a good incentive for him to track the original file.

Thank you both for the answers! I talked to the client, explained the situation and have already started to remake those 18 pages!

PDFs are not easy to edit and especially a large document like that.

pretty sure she finished the project by now its been 16 months.

There is a script that comes with indesign that allows you to import the PDF into indesign. automatically. Would take less than 10 minutes to import them. Then you could copy and paste the 18 pages into the new indesign file.

You need to create a one page document to the size of the pdf being imported unless itā€™s 8.5 x 11 I think it defaults to that size.

It is in the java scripts and it is called importmultipagepdf or something very similar. I donā€™t have access to my Mac right now.

Like Billyjean said, project was probably finished a year ago.
Itā€™s called ā€œPlace Multipage PDF.ā€ The question is whether or not you can edit them once they are placed. Iā€™m fairly certain the answer to that is ā€œno.ā€

You cannot edit them directly in InDesign - to close this off :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Affinity publisher - you can edit the pdf directly.

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Recently, I decided to quiet down my praise for Affinityā€™s products because I was starting to sound like an advocate for them.

The Adobe CC apps are obviously further along and have features that are frustratingly missing in the Affinity products. Thereā€™s no way Iā€™ll be dropping my CC subscription (yet). What is there, though, works quite nicely. For relatively inexpensive software that seemingly came out of nowhere, Affinity Designer, Publisher and Photo really are pretty good with most everything thatā€™s really needed

In a few ways the Affinity apps even surpass whatā€™s available in Adobeā€™s software. The ability to simply open PDFs and work on them in Publisher as native Publisher or Designer files is one of them. Either application will open big multi-page PDFs with everything in place and totally workable ā€” almost as if they were built in the Affinity apps to begin with. There are a few glitches here and there, and much depends on how the PDF was saved, but in general, itā€™s pretty slick.

Of course the other option is Markzwares https://markzware.com/products/pdf2dtp/
Or Recosoft https://www.recosoft.com/products/pdf2id/
(not sure if they are different products?)

Anyway - if the edits are simple Iā€™d do all the edits in Acrobat Professional.